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Saturday, January 02, 2010

Arizona Mayo Clinic Dropping Medicare Patients 
Not surprising, but here it is:

The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.


Health care providers have been squawking about low medicare reimbursement rates for years, and it's getting harder and harder for medicare patients to find providers. What was fascinating to me, though, is the sheer arrogance and denial coming from the White House and from their fellow leftist morons, the Urban Institute:

Reid Cherlin, a White House spokesman for health care, declined comment on Mayo’s decision to drop Medicare primary care patients at its Glendale clinic.


Funny, the White House was full of praise for their low-cost, high-quality, highly-efficient health care before. Cat got your tongue? Can't figure out why this might be happening?

Robert Berenson, a fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said physicians’ claims of inadequate reimbursement are overstated.


No, libtard. They're not. If they were overstated, doctors would still be seeing these patients. It is patently obvious for anyone who's not dribble-down-his-chin, charter-member-of-the-smaller-bus-club stupid that reimbursement rates do not reflect what the market will bear.

Rather, the program faces a lack of medical providers because not enough new doctors are becoming family doctors, internists and pediatricians who oversee patients’ primary care.


And why might that be, genius? Could the fact that medicare and medicaid underpay our family care doctors, internists and pediatricians so that the fields are no longer attractive to our medical school students?

“Some primary care doctors don’t have to see Medicare patients because there is an unlimited demand for their services,” Berenson said. When patients with private insurance can be treated at 50 percent to 100 percent higher fees, “then Medicare does indeed look like a poor payer,” he said
.

Holy crap. The free market slaps this leftist twit right across the face to get his attention, and he still can't figure it out. He just said that Medicare underpayment was overstated - and then in the same article concedes that medicare pays only half the going rate.

This is the kind of USDA Prime-quality stupid we're up against, here. It's the think tankers at the Urban League who are coming up with these ideas and advising our dumbest members of Congress - liberals to a man - about how to structure health care reform.

It's already a disaster and they haven't even started yet.

Splash, out

Jason

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Comments:
Good post. It is amazing that they can't figure it out. But then the moves by our government (both sides in my mind) has been one of complete arrogance and dead set against the will of the majority. They are on a full steam ahead mentality that seems to say nothing can derail their plans.
 
“Some primary care doctors don’t have to see Medicare patients because there is an unlimited demand for their services,”

There isn't an UNLIMITED demand for their services.

They don't have to see them because the law doesn't force them to. They CHOOSE not to. Imagine that, they don't want to do the same service at half the price (paid 8 mos late!).

How long do you imagine that will last when we go full-on single payer/pubic option/ obamacare?
They have the freedom now.
 
Ironically, my mother just got the bill for some X-rays she had done a few weeks ago. The hospital charges $261, Medicare (Advantage, which is being phased out) allows $48, and pays $36. I'm not even sure if that covers the film.
 
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